JDBC Data Source, character encoding troubles

[Antti Luusua]

Hello,

we are using multiple JDBC Data Sources which import user data and other data into our ServiceNow instance. In the other end there is MID Server which connects to Microsoft SQL Server to fetch the data. This has worked for multiple years now.

But since yesterday, the character encoding in the data sources is messed up in all the fields, where there are characters Ä, Ö and Å (scandinavian characters). For example, a person whose title is "myyntipäällikkö" which means sales manager in Finnish, it shows as "myyntipäällikkö"

This same is true to every table we are importing data into, for example cmdb_ci_computer which we are enriching data into, this also happens.

I tried to change the JDBC connection URL to include the "characterEncoding=UTF-8" parameter with no luck. We are experiencing the same difficulties in both production and development instances.

jdbc:sqlserver://<our_server>;selectMethod=cursor;databaseName=<our_database>;characterEncoding=UTF-8

The fields we are importing from in the SQL Server database are nvarchar field type and it has worked great for many years now.

Does anyone have a clue where to look next? I've contacted our Servicenow reseller too.

Our source databases have the following collations:
Finnish_Swedish_CI_AS
SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS

[Antti Luusua · Accepted solution]

The issue was resolved! It was a defect on Xanadu 7 patch and Now Support helped me fix the issue.

The fix:

1. Go to your MID Server
2. Stop the MID Server process
3. In the file conf/wrapper-override.conf add this line to the end of file

wrapper.java.additional.3=-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

4. Start the MID Server process again

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[Brad12]

Thank you for taking the time to post this solution. This week we realized we had the same issue you reported and your community post saved me hours of troubleshooting time. I applied this solution and it resolved our issue. Thank you, Antti, for sharing your Now Support ticket resolution.